CHAPTER VI.

The child of impulse ever to appearAnd yet through duty's path strictly to steer,O Lamb, thou art a mystery to me!Thou art so prudent, and so mad with wildness—

wrote Charles Lloyd.

Sweet and strong must have been the nature upon which the crush of sosevere a destiny produced no soreness, no bitterness, no violence but only the rebound of a wild fantastic gaiety. In his writings not only is there an entire absence of the morbid, the querulous, I can find but one expression that breathes of what his sombre experiences were. It is in that most masterly of all his criticisms (unless it be the one onLear), theGenius and Character of Hogarth, where, in the sublime description of the Bedlam scene in theRake's Progress, he tells of "the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness." In one apparent way only did the calamity which overshadowed his life, exert an influence on his genius. It turned him, as Talfourd finely suggests, "to seek a kindred interest in the sterner stuff of old tragedy—to catastrophes more fearful even than his own—to the aspects of pale passion, to shapes of heroic daring and more heroic suffering, to the agonising contests of opposing affections and the victories of the soul over calamity and death which the old English drama discloses, and in the contemplation of which he saw his own suffering nature at once mirrored and exalted." In short, no man ever stood more nobly the test of life-long affliction: 'a deep distress had harmonised his soul.'

Only on one point did the stress of his difficult lot find him vulnerable, one flaw bring to light—a tendency to counteract his depression and take the edge off his poignant anxieties by a too free use of stimulants. The manners of his day, the custom of producing wine and strong drinks on every possible occasion, bore hard on such a craving and fostered a man's weakness. But Lamb maintained to the end a good standing fight with the enemy and, if not wholly victorious,still less was he wholly defeated. So much on account of certain home anxieties to which Mary's letters to Sarah Stoddart make undisguised allusion.

Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall.—Wordsworth and his Sister in London.—Letters to Miss Stoddart.—Coleridge goes to Malta.—Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother John.

Inthe summer of 1802, when holiday time came round Charles was seized with 'a strong desire of visiting remote regions;' and after some whimsical deliberations his final resolve was to go with Mary to see Coleridge at the Lakes.

"I set out with Mary to Keswick," he tells Manning, "without giving any notice to Coleridge [who was now living at Greta Hall, soon to become Southey's home for the rest of his life] for my time being precious did not admit of it. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple, &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never came again while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I neverreceived from objects of sight before nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study which is a large antique, ill-shaped room with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church; shelves of scattered folios, an Æolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What a night!"

The Poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had died in infancy), Derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little fellow not quite two years old, with whom Charles and Mary were delighted. A merry sprite he was, in a yellow frock which obtained for him the nick-name of Stumpy Canary, who loved to race from kitchen to parlour and from parlour to kitchen just putting in his head at the door with roguish smile to catch notice, then off again, shaking his little sides with laughter. He fairly won their hearts and long after figures in their letters as Pi-pos Pot-pos, his own way of pronouncing striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out triumphantly in his picture book. Hartley, now six, was a prematurely grave and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told by Crabb Robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into "the metaphysic well without a bottom"; for once when asked something about himself and called by name he said, "Which Hartley?" "Why, is there more than one Hartley?" "Yes, there's a deal of Hartleys; there'sPicture Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his portrait] and Shadow Hartley and there's Echo Hartley and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley," seizing his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said his father, that "he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and that these should yet be one!"

Three delightful weeks they stayed. "So we have seen," continues Lamb to Manning, "Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name [Patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. Oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."

Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she "one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed"); saw Lloyd again but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home verypleasantly: Mary a good deal fatigued, finding the difference between going to a place and coming from it, but not otherwise the worse."Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship," says Lamb, soon after his return, "all about himself and Sophia and love and cant which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony."

They found the Wordsworths (the poet and his sister, that is, for he was not yet married though just about to be) lodging near their own quarters, saw much of them, pioneered them through Bartlemy Fair; and now, on Mary's part, was formed that intimacy with Dorothy which led to her being their constant visitor and sometimes their house-guest when she was in London.

As great a contrast in most respects, to Dorothy Wordsworth as the whole range of womankind could have furnished was Mary's other friend and correspondent, Sarah Stoddart, afterwards Mrs. Hazlitt. Sarah was the only daughter of a retired lieutenant in the navy, a Scotchman who had settled down on a little property at Winterslow near Salisbury which she ultimately inherited. She was a young lady with a business-like determination to marry and with many suitors; but, far from following the old injunction to be off with the old love before being on with the new, she always cautiously kept the old love dangling till she was quite sure the new was the more eligible. Mary's letters to her have happily been preserved and published by Miss Stoddart's grandson, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in hisMary and Charles Lamb. The first, dated September 21, 1803, was written after Miss Stoddart had been staying with the Lambs and when a decision had beenarrived at that she should accompany her only brother, Dr. Stoddart, to Malta where he had just been appointed King's Advocate. Mary's spelling and here and there even a little slip in the matter of grammar have been retained as seeming part of the individuality of the letters:—

"I returned from my visit yesterday and was very much pleased to find your letter; for I have been very anxious to hear how you are going on. I could hardly help expecting to see you when I came in; yet though I should have rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, I believe it was better as it was, upon the whole; and all things considered, it is certainly better you should go to Malta. The terms you are upon with your lover [a Mr. Turner to whom she was engaged] does (as you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me; however, as I cannot enter into your feelings I certainly can have nothing to say to it, only that I sincerely wish you happy in your own way however odd that way may appear to me to be. I would begin now to advise you to drop all correspondence with William [not William Hazlitt but an earlier admirer]; but, as I said before, as I cannot enter into your feelings and views of things,your ways not being my ways, why should I tell you what I would do in your situation? So, child, take thy own ways and God prosper thee in them!

"One thing my advising spirit must say; use as little secresy as possible, make a friend of your sister-in-law; you know I was not struck with her at first sight but, upon your account, I have watched and marked her very attentively and while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen we had a serious conversation. From thefrankness of her manner I am convinced she is a person I could make a friend of; why should not you? We talked freely about you; she seems to have a just notion of your character and will be fond of you if you will let her."

After instancing the misunderstandings between her own mother and aunt already quoted, Mary continues:—

"My aunt and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister yet, in some degree, theirs is the secret history, I believe, of all sisters-in-law and you will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother's wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people's real characters and never expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would in the same case. When you leave your mother and say if you never see her again you shall feel no remorse and when you make ajewishbargain with yourlover, all this gives me no offence because it is your nature and your temper and I do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you are. I love you for the good that is in you and look for no change.

"Butcertainly you ought to struggle with the evil that does most easily beset you—a total want of politeness in behaviour, I would say modesty of behaviour but that I should not convey to you my idea of the word modesty; for I certainly do not mean that you wantreal modestyand what is usually called false or mock modesty I certainly do not wish you to possess; yet I trust you know what I mean well enough.Secresy, though you appear all frankness, is certainly agrand failing of yours; it is likewise yourbrother'sand, therefore, a family failing. By secresy I mean you both want the habit of telling each other, at the moment, everything that happens, where you go and what you do—that free communication of letters and opinions just as they arrive as Charles and I do—and which is, after all, the only ground-work of friendship. Your brother, I will answer for it, will never tell his wife or his sister all that is in his mind; he will receive letters and not [mention it]. This is a fault Mrs. Stoddart can never [tell him of] but she can and will feel it though on the whole and in every other respect she is happy with him. Begin, for God's sake, at the first and tell her everything that passes. At first she may hear you with indifference, but in time this will gain her affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no matter if she does not show hers). It is a pleasant thing for a friend to put into one's hand a letter just fresh from the post. I would even say, begin with showing her this but that it is freely written and loosely and some apology ought to be made for it which I know not how to make, for I must write freely or not at all.

"If you do this she will tell your brother, you will say; and what then, quotha? It will beget a freer communication amongst you which is a thing devoutly to be wished.

"God bless you and grant you may preserve your integrity and remain unmarried and penniless, and make William a good and a happy wife."

No wonder Mary's friendships were so stable and so various with this knack of hers of looking into another's real character and never expecting him or her to act out of it or to do as she would in thesame case; taking no offence, looking for no change and asking for no other explanation than that it was her friend's nature. It is an epitome of social wisdom and of generous sentiment.

Coleridge had long been in bad health and worse spirits; and what he had first ignorantly used as a remedy was now become his tyrant—opium; for a time the curse of his life and the blight of his splendid powers. Sometimes—

Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted;

sometimes he was stranded "in a howling wilderness of ghastly dreams" waking and sleeping, followed by deadly languors which opium caused and cured and caused again, driving him round in an accursed circle. He came up to London at the beginning of 1804, was much with the Lambs if not actually their guest, and finally decided to try change and join his friend Dr. Stoddart in Malta where he landed April 18th. Mary, full of earnest and affectionate solicitude, sent a letter by him to Sarah Stoddart who had already arrived, bespeaking a warm and indulgent welcome for her suffering friend:—

"I will just write a few hasty lines to say Coleridge is setting off sooner than we expected and I every moment expect him to call in one of his great hurrys for this. We rejoiced with exceeding great joy to hear of your safe arrival. I hope your brother will return home in a few years a very rich man. Seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty beginning.

"I envy your brother the pleasure of seeing Coleridge drop in unexpectedly upon him; we talk—but it is but wild and idle talk—of following him. He is to get my brother some snug little place of athousand a year and we are to leave all and come and live among ye. What a pretty dream.

"Coleridge is very ill. I dread the thoughts of his long voyage. Write as soon as he arrives whetherhedoes or not, and tell me how he is….

"He has got letters of recommendation to Governor Ball and God knows who; and he will talk and talk and be universally admired. But I wish to write for him aletter of recommendationto Mrs. Stoddart and to yourself to take upon ye, on his first arrival, to be kind affectionate nurses; and mind, now, that you perform this duty faithfully and write me a good account of yourself. Behave to him as you would to me or to Charles if we came sick and unhappy to you.

"I have no news to send you; Coleridge will tell you how we are going on. Charles has lost the newspaper [an engagement on theMorning Post, which Coleridge had procured for him] but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits since this has happened; and I hope, when I write next, I shall be able to tell you Charles has begun something which will produce a little money for it is not well to bevery poorwhich we certainly are at this present writing.

"I sit writing here and thinking almost you will see it to-morrow; and what a long, long time it will be ere you receive this. When I saw your letter I fancy'd you were even just then in the first bustle of a new reception, every moment seeing new faces and staring at new objects when, at that time, everything had become familiar to you; and the strangers, your new dancing partners, had perhaps become gossiping fireside friends. You tell me of your gay, splendid doings; tell me, likewise, what manner of home-life you lead. Is a quiet evening in aMaltese drawing-room as pleasant as those we have passed in Mitre Court and Bell Yard? Tell me all about it, everything pleasant and everything unpleasant that befalls you.

"I want you to say a great deal about yourself.Are you happy? and do you not repent going out?I wish I could see you for one hour only.

"Remember me affectionately to your sister and brother, and tell me when you write if Mrs. Stoddart likes Malta and how the climate agrees with her and with thee.

"We heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the tale.

"How did the pearls and the fine court finery bear the fatigues of the voyage and how often have they been worn and admired?

"Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. Satisfy him in that little particular when you write.

"The Fenwicks send their love and Mrs. Reynolds her love and the little old lady her best respects.

"Mrs. Jeffries, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes and when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord! how frightened she was. She has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension of two thousand a year whenever he chooses to return to England.

"God bless you and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses."

Mrs. Reynolds was another 'little old lady,' a familiar figure at the Lambs' table. She had once been Charles's schoolmistress; had made an unfortunate marriage and would have gone under in the social stream but for his kindly hand. Out of their slender means he allowed her thirtypounds a year. She tickled Hood's fancy when he too became a frequent guest there; and he has described her as formal, fair and flaxen-wigged like an elderly wax doll, speaking as if by an artificial apparatus, through some defect in the palate and with a slight limp and a twist occasioned by running too precipitately down Greenwich hill in her youth! She remembered Goldsmith who had once lent her hisDeserted Village.

In those days of universal warfare and privateering it was an anxious matter to have a friend tossing in the Bay of Biscay, gales and storms apart; so that tidings from Sarah had been eagerly watched for:—

"Your letter," writes Mary, "which contained the news of Coleridge's arrival was a most welcome one; for we had begun to entertain very unpleasant apprehensions for his safety; and your kind reception of the forlorn wanderer gave me the greatest pleasure and I thank you for it in my own and my brother's name. I shall depend upon you for hearing of his welfare for he does not write himself; but as long as we know he is safe and in such kind friends' hands we do not mind. Your letters, my dear Sarah, are to me very, very precious ones. They are the kindest, best, most natural ones I ever received. The one containing the news of the arrival of Coleridge is, perhaps, the best I ever saw; and your old friend Charles is of my opinion. We sent it off to Mrs. Coleridge and the Wordsworths—as well because we thought it our duty to give them the first notice we had of our dear friend's safety as that we were proud of showing our Sarah's pretty letter.

"The letters we received a few days after from you and your brother were far less welcome ones. I rejoiced to hear your sister is well butI grieved for the loss of the dear baby and I am sorry to find your brother is not so successful as he expected to be; and yet I am almost tempted to wish his ill-fortune may send him over to us again. He has a friend, I understand, who is now at the head of the Admiralty; why may he not return and make a fortune here?

"I cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in the fortune-making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see you a comfortable English wife; and the forsaken, forgotten William, of English-partridge memory I have still a hankering after. However, I thank you for your frank communication and I beg you will continue it in future; and if I do not agree with a good grace to your having a Maltese husband, I will wish you happy, provided you make it a part of your marriage articles that your husband shall allow you to come over sea and make me one visit; else may neglect and overlookedness be your portion while you stay there.

"I would condole with you when the misfortune has befallen your poor leg; but such is the blessed distance we are at from each other that I hope, before you receive this, you have forgot it ever happened.

"Our compliments to the high ton at the Maltese court. Your brother is so profuse of them to me that, being, as you know, so unused to them, they perplex me sadly; in future I beg they may be discontinued. They always remind me of the free, and I believe very improper letter I wrote to you while you were at the Isle of Wight [that already given advising frankness]. The more kindly you and your brother and sister took the impertinent advice contained in it the more certain I feel that it was unnecessary and, therefore, highly improper. Do not letyour brother compliment me into the memory of it again.

"My brother has had a letter from your mother which has distressed him sadly—about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. Your silly brother, it seems, has informed your mother (I did not think your brother could have been so silly) that Charles had grumbled at paying the said postage. The fact was just at that time we were very poor having lost theMorning Postand we were beginning to practise a strict economy. My brother, who never makes up his mind whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at all times a strange mixture of both" [rigid in those small economies which enabled him to be not only just but generous on small means]. "Of this failing the even economy of your correct brother's temper makes him an ill judge. The miserly part of Charles, at that time smarting under his recent loss, then happened to reign triumphant; and he would not write or let me write so often as he wished because the postage cost two and fourpence. Then came two or three of your poor mother's letters nearly together; and the two and fourpences he wished but grudged to pay for his own he was forced to pay for hers. In this dismal distress he applied to Fenwick to get his friend Motley to send them free from Portsmouth. This Mr. Fenwick could have done for half a word's speaking; but this he did not do! Then Charles foolishly and unthinkingly complained to your brother in a half-serious, half-joking way; and your brother has wickedly and with malice aforethought told your mother. O fye upon him! what will your mother think of us?

"I, too, feel my share of blame in this vexatious business; for I saw the unlucky paragraph in my brother's letter; and I had a kind offoreboding that it would come to your mother's ears—although I had a higher idea of your brother's good sense than I find he deserved. By entreaties and prayer I might have prevailed on my brother to say nothing about it. But I make a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always appears to me to be a vexatious kind of tyranny that women have no business to exercise over men, which, merely becausethey having a better judgment, they have power to do. Letmenalone and at last we find they come round to the right way whichwe, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.

"Charles is sadly fretted now, I know, at what to say to your mother. I have made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to re-instate us in your mother's good graces. Say to her it was a jest misunderstood; tell her Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for but that he is, now and then, a trifle whimsical or so. I do not ask your brother to do this for I am offended with him for the mischief he has made.

"I feel that I have too lightly passed over the interesting account you sent me of your late disappointment. It was not because I did not feel and completely enter into the affair with you. You surprise and please me with the frank and generous way in which you deal with your lovers, taking a refusal from their so prudential hearts with a better grace and more good humour than other women accept a suitor's service. Continue this open artless conduct and I trust you will at last findsome man who has sense enough to know you are well worth risking a peaceable life of poverty for. I shall yet live to see you a poor but happy English wife.

"Remember me most affectionately to Coleridge, and I thank you again and again for all your kindness to him. To dear Mrs. Stoddart and your brother I beg my best love; and to you all I wish health and happiness and asoonreturn to old England.

"I have sent to Mr. Burrel's for your kind present, but unfortunately he is not in town. I am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs and I thank you for them not as a present, for I do not love presents, but as a remembrance of your old friend. Farewell."I am, my best Sarah,"Your most affectionate Friend,

"Mary Lamb."

"Good wishes and all proper remembrances from old nurse, Mrs. Jeffries, Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Rickman, &c. Long live Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo and all the old merry phantoms."

Sarah Stoddart returned to England before the year was out. Coleridge remained in Malta, filling temporarily, at the request of Sir Alexander Ball, governor of the island, the post of public secretary till the end of September, 1805 when his friends lost track of him altogether for nearly a year; during which he visited Paris, wandered through Italy, Sicily, Cairo, and saw Vesuvius in December when "the air was so consolidated with a massy cloud-curtain that it appeared like a mountain in basso-relievo in an interminable wall of some pantheon"; and after narrowly escaping imprisonment at the hands ofNapoleon, suddenly reappeared amongst his friends in the autumn of 1806.

To the Wordsworths, brother and sister and young wife, for the three were one in heart, this year of 1805 had been one of overwhelming sorrow. Their brother John, the brave and able ship's captain who yet loved "all quiet things" as dearly as William "although he loved more silently," and was wont to carry that beloved brother's poems to sea and con them to the music of the winds and waves; whose cherished scheme, so near fulfilment, it was to realise enough to settle in a cottage at Grasmere and devote his earnings to the poet's use so that he might pursue his way unharassed by a thought of money,—this brother was shipwrecked on the Bill of Portland just as he was starting, and whilst the ship was yet in the pilot's hands, on what was to have been, in how different a sense, his last voyage.

Six weeks beneath the moving seaHe lay in slumber quietly;Unforced by wind or waveTo quit the ship for which he died(All claims of duty satisfied);And there they found him at her side,And bore him to the grave.

After waiting awhile in silence before a grief of such magnitude Mary wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth. She speaks as one acquainted with a life-long sorrow yet who has learned to find its companionship not bitter:—

"I thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you though I have often attempted it; but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tellyou that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with and through your lost brother and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you I felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so; but I send you some poor lines which I wrote under this conviction of mind and before I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now, before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then for I know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be borrowed: but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts and I never have the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with dissatisfaction:—

Why is he wandering on the sea?Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.By slow degrees he'd steal awayTheir woe and gently bring a ray(So happily he'd time relief)Of comfort from their very grief.He'd tell them that their brother dead,When years have passed o'er their head,Will be remembered with such holy,True, and perfect melancholy,That ever this lost brother JohnWill be their heart's companion.His voice they'll always hear,His face they'll always see:There's nought in life so sweetAs such a memory.

Thus for a moment are we permitted to see that, next to love for her brother, the memory of her dead mother and friendship for Coleridge were the deep and sacred influences of Mary's life.

Mary in the Asylum again.—Lamb's Letter with a Poem of hers.—Her slow Recovery.—Letters to Sarah Stoddart.—TheTales from Shakespearebegun.—Hazlitt's Portrait of Lamb.—Sarah's Lovers.—The Farce ofMr. H.

Theletter to Miss Wordsworth called forth a response; but, alas! Mary was in sad exile when it arrived and Charles, with a heart full of grief, wrote for her:—

"14th June 1805.

"Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better); but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses and is at presentfrom home. Last Monday week was the day she left me and I hope I may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her indisposition…. I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All mystrength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her for I know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade….

"I cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor Mary made upon a picture (a 'Holy Family') which we saw at an auction only one week before she left home. She was then beginning to show signs of ill-boding. They are sweet lines, and upon a sweet picture; but I send them only as the last memorial of her:—

Virgin and Child, L. da Vinci.Maternal lady, with thy virgin grace,Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,And thou a virgin pure.Lady most perfect, when thy angel faceMen look upon, they wish to beA Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.

"You had her lines about the 'Lady Blanch.' You have not had somewhich she wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian which I had hung up where that print of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures from L. da Vinci) had hung in our room. 'Tis light and pretty:—

Who art thou, fair one, who usurp'st the placeOf Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace?Come, fair and pretty tell to meWho in thy life-time thou might'st be?Thou pretty art and fair,But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare.No need for Blanch her history to tell,Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well;But when I look on thee, I only knowThere lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago.

"This is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves and to advert so little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you all. But my own cares press pretty close upon me and you can make allowances. That you may go on gathering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary's recovery.

"I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Supposing that Mary will be well and able there is anotherabilitywhich you may guess at which I cannot promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come. This illness will make it still more prudential to wait. It is not a balance of this way of spending our money against another way but an absolute question of whether we shall stop now or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand which my wise conduct has already encroached upon one half."

Pity it is that the little poem on the 'Lady Blanch' should have perished, as I fear it has, if it contained as 'sweet lines' as the foregoing.

Little more than a month after this (July 27), Charles writes cheerfully to Manning:—

"My old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence and will shortly resume the power of the keys, so I shan't be cheated of my tea and liquors. Wind in the West which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure now to anticipate seeing thee again. Have been taking leave [it was a very short leave] of tobacco in a rhyming address. Had thoughtthat veinhad long since closed up. Find I can rhyme and reason too. Think of studying mathematics to restrain the fire of my genius which George Dyer recommends. Have frequent bleedings at the nose which shows plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of wonders. Got incredibly sober and regular; shave oftener and hum a tune to signify cheerfulness and gallantry.

"Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and stout. Will not refuse nature who has done such things for me!

"Nurse! don't call me unless Mr. Manning comes.—What! the gentleman in spectacles?—Yes.

Dormit. C. L.

"Saturday, Hot noon."

But although Mary was sufficiently recovered to return home at the end of the summer she continued much shaken by the severity of this attack and so also did her brother all through the autumn; as the following letters to Sarah Stoddart and still more one already quoted (pp.75-6) show:—

September 1805.

"Certainly you are the best letter-writer (besides writing the besthand) in the world. I have just been reading over again your two long letters and I perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a bran new pen and put on myspectaclesand am peering with all my might to see the lines in the paper which the sight of your even lines had well-nigh tempted me to rule; and I have moreover taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary to clear my head which feels more cloudy than common this fine cheerful morning.

"All I can gather from your clear and, I have no doubt, faithful history of Maltese politics is that the good doctor, though a firm friend, an excellent fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright advocate and, in short, all that they say upon tombstones (for I do not recollect that they celebrate any fraternal virtues there)—yet is he but amoodybrother; that your sister-in-law is pretty much like what all sisters-in-law have been since the first happy invention of the marriage state; that friend Coleridge has undergone no alteration by crossing the Atlantic [geography was evidently no part of Captain Starkey's curriculum] for his friendliness to you as well as the oddities you mention are just what one ought to look for from him; and that you, my dear Sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to flourish in a little proud garrison town as I did shrewdly suspect you were before you went there.

"If I possibly can I will prevail upon Charles to write to your brother by the conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell I almost fear the fortnight will slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed, it has been sad and heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well his low spirits throw me back again; and when he begins to get a little cheerful then I do the same kind office for him. I heartily wish for thearrival of Coleridge; a few such evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up and set us going again.

"Do not say anything when you write of our low spirits; it will vex Charles. You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces and saying 'How do you do?' and 'How do you do?' and then we fall a crying and say we will be better on the morrow. He says we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum-boil which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort.

"I rejoice to hear of your mother's amendment; when you can leave her with any satisfaction to yourself—which, as her sister, I think I understand by your letter, is with her, I hope you may soon be able to do—let me know upon what plan you mean to come to town. Your brother proposed your being six months in town and six with your mother; but he did not then know of your poor mother's illness. By his desire I enquired for a respectable family for you to board with and from Captain Burney I heard of one I thought would suit you at that time. He particularly desires I would not think of your being with us, not thinking, I conjecture, the house of a single manrespectableenough. Your brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over you, to be the inspector of all your actions and to direct and govern you with a stern voice and a high hand; to be, in short, a very elder brother over you. Does the hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you long to come to London? I am making all the proper enquiries, against the time, of the newest and most approved modes (being myself mainlyignorant in these points) of etiquette and nicely correct maidenly manners.

"But to speak seriously. I mean, when we meet, that we will lay our heads together and consult and contrive the best way of making the best girl in the world the fine lady her brother wishes to see her and believe me, Sarah, it is not so difficult a matter as one is apt to imagine. I have observed many a demure lady who passes muster admirably well who, I think, we could easily learn to imitate in a week or two. We will talk of these things when we meet. In the meantime I give you free leave to be happy and merry at Salisbury in any way you can. Has the partridge season opened any communication between you and William? As I allow you to be imprudent till I see you, I shall expect to hear you have invited him to taste his own birds. Have you scratched him out of your will yet? Rickman is married and that is all the news I have to send you. I seem, upon looking over my letter again, to have written too lightly of your distresses at Malta; but, however I may have written, believe me I enter very feelingly into all your troubles. I love you and I love your brother; and between you, both of whom, I think, have been to blame, I know not what to say—only this I say,—try to think as little as possible of past miscarriages; it was perhaps so ordered by Providence that you might return home to be a comfort to your mother."

No long holiday trip was to be ventured on while Mary continued thus shaken and depressed. "We have been two tiny excursions this summer, for three or four days each, to a place near Harrow and to Egham where Cooper's Hill is and that is the total history of our rustication thisyear", Charles tells Wordsworth. In October Mary gives a slightly better account of herself:—

"I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always brought your troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that I have been obliged to leave off and make Charles write for me. I am resolved now, however few lines I write, this shall go; for I know, my kind friend, you will like once more to see my own handwriting.

"I have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that I begin almost to feel myself once more a living creature and to hope for happier times; and in that hope I include the prospect of once more seeing my dear Sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. How did I wish for your presence to cheer my drooping heart when I returned home from banishment.

"Is your being with or near your poor dear mother necessary to her comfort? Does she take any notice of you? And is there any prospect of her recovery? How I grieve for her, for you….

"I went to the Admiralty, about your mother's pension; from thence I was directed to an office in Lincoln's Inn…. They informed me it could not be paid to any person but Mr. Wray without a letter of attorney…. Do not let us neglect this business and make use of me in any way you can.

"I have much to thank you and your kind brother for. I kept the dark silk, as you may suppose. You have made me very fine; the brooch is very beautiful. Mrs. Jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your present; she desires all manner of thanks and good wishes. Your maid'ssister has gone to live a few miles from town. Charles, however, found her out and gave her the handkerchief.

"I want to know if you have seen William and if there is any prospect in future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that related to him was so burnt in the fumigating that we could only make out that it was unfavourable but not the particulars; tell us again how you go on or if you have seen him. I conceit affairs will somehow be made up between you at last.

"I want to know how your brother goes on. Is he likely to make a very good fortune and in how long a time? And how is he in the way of home comforts—I mean is he very happy with Mrs. Stoddart? This was a question I could not ask while you were there and perhaps is not a fair one now; but I want to know how you all went on and, in short, twenty little foolish questions that one ought, perhaps, rather to ask when we meet than to write about. But do make me a little acquainted with the inside of the good doctor's house and what passes therein.

"Was Coleridge often with you? or did your brother and Col. argue long arguments till between the two great argue-ers there grew a little coolness; or perchance the mighty friendship between Coleridge and your Sovereign governor, Sir Alexander Ball, might create a kind of jealousy; for we fancy something of a coolness did exist from the little mention of C. ever made in your brother's letters.

"Write us, my good girl, a long gossiping letter answering all these foolish questions—and tell me any silly thing you can recollect—any, the least particular, will be interesting to us and we will never telltales out of school; but we used to wonder and wonder how you all went on; and when you was coming home we said 'Now we shall hear all from Sarah.'

"God bless you, my dear friend…. If you have sent Charles any commissions he has not executed write me word—he says he has lost or mislaid a letter desiring him to inquire about a wig. Write two letters—one of business and pensions and one all about Sarah Stoddart and Malta.

"We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would like to have it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?"

Mary's interest in her friend and her friend's affairs is so hearty one cannot choose but share it and would gladly see what "the best letter-writer in the world" had to tell of Coleridge and Stoddart and the long arguments and little jealousies; and whether 'William' had continued to dangle on, spite of distance and discouragement; and even to learn that the old lady received her pension and her wig in safety. But curiosity must remain unsatisfied for none of Miss Stoddart's letters have been preserved.

"The picture of Charles" was, we may feel pretty sure, one which William Hazlitt painted this year of Lamb 'in the costume of a Venetian senator.' It is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting portrait. Lamb was just thirty; and it gives, on the whole, a striking impression of the nobility and beauty of form and feature which characterised his head and partly realises Proctor's description—"a countenance so full of sensibility that it came upon you like a new thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards"; though the subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the mouth are not fully rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock,done when Lamb was twenty-three, engraved in Cottle'sEarly Recollections of Coleridge, each may be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect,—Hancock's being in profile, Hazlitt's (of which there is a good lithograph in Barry Cornwall'sMemoir) nearly full face. The print from it prefixed to Fitzgerald'sLambis almost unrecognisable. It was the last time Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it comes as a pleasant surprise—an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as a painter; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship.

It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and life-long. Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother John, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle much frequented by the Lambs.

"It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present," Mary had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to undertake her first literary venture, theTales from Shakespeare. The nature of the malady from which she suffered made continuous mental exertion distressing and probably injurious; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished, regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme occurs in a letter to Sarah Stoddart dated April 22, 1806, written thevery day she had left the Lambs:—

"I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily to Rome with a party; but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We think there is some mistake in this account and that his intended journey to Rome was in his former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at that time he had any such intention will you write instantly? for I do not know whether I ought to write to Mrs. Coleridge or not.

"I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that I will write you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. It is not a birthday, nor a new year's day, nor a leave-off smoking day; but it is about an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor Phœnix, in the Salisbury stage and Charles has just left me to go to his lodgings [a room to work in free from the distraction of constant visitors just hired experimentally] and I am holding a solitary consultation with myself as to how I shall employ myself.

"Writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring and vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time, aches with the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea of I cannot tell what-about-notion that I have not made you half so comfortable as I ought to have done and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on your return home. Then I think I will make my new gown; and now I consider the white petticoat will be better candle-light work; and then I look at the fire and think if theirons was but down I would iron my gowns—you having put me out of conceit of mangling.

"So much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours. Returning home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you, as you know is our usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been what you yourself discovered,not at all in our way; and although, if the postmaster should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great compliment yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs, will understand and value it as well as what we likewise asserted that since you have been with us you have done but one foolish thing,videPinckhorn (excuse my bad Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I intend). We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our whimsies and, to use a phrase of Coleridge,understood us. We had, in short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the want of respect you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of action, you know what I mean, which—though it only broke out in the acceptance of the old justice's book and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct while you were here—yet is it so native a feeling in your mind that you will do whatever the present moment prompts you to do, that I wish you would take that one slight offence seriously to heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. Then, mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be!!!

"You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have I the sense of your absence so strong upon me that I was reallythinking what news I had to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. Truly nothing, except that Martin Burney met us in Lincoln's Inn Fields and borrowed fourpence, of the repayment of which sum I will send you due notice.

"Friday.—Last night I told Charles of your matrimonial overtures from Mr. White and of the cause of that business being at astandstill. Your generous conduct in acquainting Mr. White with the vexatious affair at Malta highly pleased him. He entirely approves of it. You would be quite comforted to hear what he said on the subject.

"He wishes you success; and when Coleridge comes will consult with him about what is best to be done. But I charge you be most strictly cautious how you proceed yourself. Do not give Mr. W. any reason to think you indiscreet; let him return of his own accord and keep the probability of his doing so full in your mind; so, I mean, as to regulate your whole conduct by that expectation. Do not allow yourself to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with William nor do any other silly thing of that kind; for you may depend upon it he will be a kind of spy upon you and, if he observes nothing that he disapproves of you will certainly hear of him again in time.

"Charles is gone to finish the farce [Mr. H.] and I am to hear it read this night. I am so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how I shall like it that I do not know what I am doing. I need not tell you so for before I send this I shall be able to tell you all about it. If I think it will amuse you I will send you a copy.The bed was very cold last night.

"I have received your letter and am happy to hear that your mother has been so well in your absence, which I wish had been prolonged alittle, for you have been wanted to copy out the Farce, in the writing of which I made many an unlucky blunder.

"The said Farce I carried (after many consultations of who was the most proper person to perform so important an office) to Wroughton, the manager of Drury Lane. He was very civil to me; said it did not depend upon himself, but that he would put it into the proprietor's hands, and that we should certainly have an answer from them.

"I have been unable to finish this sheet before, for Charles has taken a week's holliday from his lodging to rest himself after his labour, and we have talked of nothing but the Farce night and day; but yesterday I carried it to Wroughton, and since it has been out of the way our minds have been a little easier. I wish you had been with us to have given your opinion. I have half a mind to scribble another copy and send it you. I like it very much, and cannot help having great hopes of its success.

"I would say I was very sorry for the death of Mr. White's father, but not knowing the good old gentleman, I cannot help being as well satisfied that he is gone, for his son will feel rather lonely, and so, perhaps, he may chance to visit again Winterslow. You so well describe your brother's grave lecturing letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. I would fain re-write it, leaving out my 'sage advice'; but if I begin another letter something may fall out to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well as you can; it shall be the last I ever send you.

"It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then; but there is something mightyirksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and friendly remembrances.

"I have heard a vague report from the Dawes (the pleasant-looking young lady we called upon was Miss Dawe) that Coleridge returned back to Naples; they are to make further inquiries and let me know the particulars. We have seen little or nothing of Manning since you went. Your friend George Burnett calls as usual for Charlesto point out something for him. I miss you sadly, and but for the fidget I have been in about the Farce, I should have missed you still more. I am sorry you cannot get your money; continue to tell us all your perplexities, and do not mind being called Widow Blackacre.

"Say all in your mind about yourLover; now Charles knows of it, he will be as anxious to hear as me. All the time we can spare from talking of the characters and plot of the Farce, we talk of you. I have got a fresh bottle of brandy to-day; if you were here you should have a glass,three parts brandy, so you should. I bought a pound of bacon to-day, not so good as yours. I wish the little caps were finished. I am glad the medicines and the cordials bore the fatigue of their journey so well. I promise you I will write often, andnot mind the postage. God bless you. Charles doesnotsend his love because he is not here.Write as often as ever you can.Do not work too hard."

There is a little anecdote of Sarah Stoddart, told by her grandson, which helps to mitigate our astonishment at Mary's too hospitable suggestion in regard to the brandy. Lieutenant Stoddart would sometimes, while sipping his grog, say to his children, "John, willyou have some?" "No thank you, father." "Sarah, will you?" "Yes, please, father." "Not," adds Mr. Hazlitt, "that she ever indulged to excess; but she was that sort of woman." Very far, certainly, from "the perfect little gentlewoman" Mary hoped one day to see her; but friendly, not without brains, with a kindly heart, and her worst qualities such, surely, as spread themselves freely on the surface, but strike no deep or poisonous roots. "Do not mind being called Widow Blackacre," says Mary, alluding to one of the characters in Wycherley'sPlain Dealer. It certainly was not gratifying to be likened to that "perverse, bustling, masculine, pettifogging, and litigious" lady, albeit Macaulay speaks of her as Wycherley's happiest creation.

When Hazlitt returned to Wem, Lamb sent him his first letter full of friendly gossip:—

"… We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have happened which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication, but which, seated about our fireside at night (the winter hands of pork have begun), gesture and emphasis might have talked into some importance. Something about Rickman's wife, for instance; how tall she is, and that she visits pranked up like a Queen of the May with green streamers; a good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor. Something, too, about Monkey [Louisa Martin], which can't so well be written; how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers and was obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register, where it was proved to be only twelve, and an edict issued that it should not give itself airs yet this four years; and how it got leaveto be called Miss by grace. These, and such like hows were in my head to tell you, but who can write? Also how Manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy, and seems to have something in his head which he don't impart. Then, how I am going to leave off smoking…. You disappoint me in passing over in absolute silence the Blenheim Leonardo. Didn't you see it? Excuse a lover's curiosity. I have seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe's gallery. It is curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their way. For instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. D. has chosen to illustrate the story of Samson exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most happy; the interview between the Jewish hero, blind and captive, and Dalilah. Milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horsehair or porcupine's bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs 'which of a nation armed contained the strength.' I don't remember hesaysblack; but could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe, with striking originality of conception, has crowned him with a thin yellow wig; in colour precisely like Dyson's, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor's (Godwin's wife); his limbs rather stout, about such a man as my brother or Rickman, but no Atlas, nor Hercules, nor yet so long as Dubois, the clown of Sadler's Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact; for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple with a golden tress, as soon as with all the cables of the British navy….

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